Living Letters of the Law

Living Letters of the Law
Author: Jeremy Cohen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 1999-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520218703

"Well, clearly, and articulately written, Living Letters of the Law is among the most important books in medieval European history generally, as well as in its particular field."—Edward Peters, author of The First Crusade

Letter from Birmingham Jail

Letter from Birmingham Jail
Author: MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780241339466

This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, and reflects on the healing power of love.

Against Two Letters of the Pelagians

Against Two Letters of the Pelagians
Author: Saint Augustine
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2015-06-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781514260043

Augustine, the man with upturned eye, with pen in the left hand, and a burning heart in the right (as he is usually represented), is a philosophical and theological genius of the first order, towering like a pyramid above his age, and looking down commandingly upon succeeding centuries. He had a mind uncommonly fertile and deep, bold and soaring; and with it, what is better, a heart full of Christian love and humility. He stands of right by the side of the greatest philosophers of antiquity and of modern times. We meet him alike on the broad highways and the narrow footpaths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod. As a theologian he is facile princeps, at least surpassed by no church father, schoolman, or reformer. With royal munificence he scattered ideas in passing, which have set in mighty motion other lands and later times. He combined the creative power of Tertullian with the churchly spirit of Cyprian, the speculative intellect of the Greek church with the practical tact of the Latin. He was a Christian philosopher and a philosophical theologian to the full.

Paul and the Law

Paul and the Law
Author: Brian S. Rosner
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-05-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0830895647

Brian S. Rosner seeks to build bridges between old and new perspectives on Paul with this biblical-theological account of the apostle's complex relationship with Jewish law. Rosner argues that Paul reevaluates the Law of Moses, including its repudiation as legal code, its replacement by other things, and its reappropriation as prophecy and wisdom.

Kabbalistic Revolution

Kabbalistic Revolution
Author: Hartley Lachter
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2014-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0813573890

The set of Jewish mystical teachings known as Kabbalah are often imagined as timeless texts, teachings that have been passed down through the millennia. Yet, as this groundbreaking new study shows, Kabbalah flourished in a specific time and place, emerging in response to the social prejudices that Jews faced. Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain, a place where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise and Jewish political power was on the wane. Kabbalistic Revolution proposes that, given this context, Kabbalah must be understood as a radically empowering political discourse. While the era’s Christian preachers claimed that Jews were blind to the true meaning of scripture and had been abandoned by God, the Kabbalists countered with a doctrine that granted Jews a uniquely privileged relationship with God. Lachter demonstrates how Kabbalah envisioned this increasingly marginalized group at the center of the universe, their mystical practices serving to maintain the harmony of the divine world. For students of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalistic Revolution provides a new approach to the development of medieval Kabbalah. Yet the book’s central questions should appeal to anyone with an interest in the relationships between religious discourses, political struggles, and ethnic pride.

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess
Author: Adrienne Williams Boyarin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2020-10-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812297504

In the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Trinity Term 1277, Adrienne Williams Boyarin finds the case of one Sampson son of Samuel, a Jew of Northampton, arrested for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. He was sentenced to walk for three days through the centers of London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton carrying the entrails and flayed skin of a calf and exposing his naked, circumcised body to onlookers. Sampson's crime and sentence, Williams Boyarin argues, suggest that he made a convincing friar—when clothed. Indeed, many English texts of this era struggle with the similarities of Jews and Christians, but especially of Jewish and Christian women. Unlike men, Jewish women did not typically wear specific identifying clothing, nor were they represented as physiognomically distinct. Williams Boyarin observes that both before and after the periods in which art historians note a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, English authors highlight and exploit Jewish women's indistinguishability from Christians. Exploring what she calls a "polemics of sameness," she elucidates an essential part of the rhetoric employed by medieval anti-Jewish materials, which could assimilate the Jew into the Christian and, as a consequence, render the Jewess a dangerous but unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess considers realities and fantasies of indistinguishability. It focuses on how medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish—positively or negatively, historically or figurally. Williams Boyarin identifies and explores polemics of sameness through a broad range of theological, historical, and literary works from medieval England before turning more specifically to stereotypes of Jewish women and the ways in which rhetorical strategies that blur the line between "saming" and "othering" reveal gendered habits of representation.

Mystical Resistance

Mystical Resistance
Author: Ellen D. Haskell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-07-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190612894

The thirteenth-century Jewish mystical classic Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Splendor), commonly known as the Zohar, took shape against a backdrop of rising anti-Judaism in Spain. Mystical Resistance reveals that in addition to the Zohar's role as a theological masterpiece, its kabbalistic teachings offer passionate and knowledgeable critiques of Christian majority culture. During the Zohar's development, Christian friars implemented new missionizing strategies, forced Jewish attendance at religious disputations, and seized and censored Jewish books. In response, the kabbalists who composed the Zohar crafted strategically subversive narratives aimed at diminishing Christian authority. Hidden between the lines of its fascinating stories, the Zohar makes daring assertions that challenge themes important to medieval Christianity, including Christ's Passion and ascension, the mendicant friars' new missionizing strategies, and Gothic art's claims of Christian dominion. These assertions rely on an intimate and complex knowledge of Christianity gleaned from rabbinic sources, polemic literature, public Church art, and encounters between Christians and Jews. Much of the kabbalists' subversive discourse reflects language employed by writers under oppressive political regimes, treading a delicate line between public and private, power and powerlessness, subservience and defiance. By placing the Zohar in its thirteenth-century context, Haskell opens this text as a rich and fruitful source of Jewish cultural testimony produced at the epicenter of sweeping changes in the relationship between medieval Western Europe's Christian majority and its Jewish minority.

The Friars and the Jews

The Friars and the Jews
Author: Jeremy Cohen
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1982
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801492662

"Cohen argues that it was in the thirteenth century that a fundamental shift occurred in the Christian perception of both Judaism and Jews in Western Europe, and he attributes this change to the activities of the newly-formed mendicant orders--the Dominicans and Franciscans. In order to make this case as effectively as he does, the author has to approach his problem from two different perspectives--that of the historian of the medieval church, and that of the Jewish historian. Each of these approaches has its own scholarly literature, its own emphases, its own particular blind spots. It is the principal quality of this book that it focuses a steady, clear light on those dark corners, and will make sense to a variety of readers.... Cohen's views will be taken seriously. Indeed, the calm and sensible tone of this book may help stimulate a new scholarly debate."--American Jewish History

The Wheel of Language

The Wheel of Language
Author: David K. Coley
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2012-05-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0815651678

Analyzes the political, theological and social dimensions of speech as depicted in late medieval English lyric poetry.